OCZ Technology Enyo 128GB Portable USB 3.0 SSD Review

Inside the OCZ Enyo 128GB SSD

As with any Solid-State Drive (SSD) we had to open up the OCZ Enyo and take a peek inside to see what components that OCZ is using to produce this storage drive. By breaking the sticker that voids the warranty and removing four #0 Philips screws the OCZ Enyo cover was lifted off. Inside we were able to make out eight Intel 34nm MLC NAND Flash chips on this side of the PCB. The PCB is held inside the Enyo with two more Philips screws and we, of course, had to remove those as well.

Once the final two screws were removed the printed circuit board (PCB) could be removed and flipped over. Here we can see that the OCZ Enyo uses an Indilinx ‘Eco’ SSD controller, a Symwave USB 3.0 controller and a 128mb Elpida cache chip. The use of the Indilinx controller gives us a hint on how the OCZ Enyo will perform as we have seen this controller on many internal SSDs over the past year.

Taking a closer look at the Indilinx controller we can see that this specific drive is using an IndiLinx-ECO processor with the part number IDX110M01-LC. This is a new revision of the ‘Barefoot’ IDX110 controller. The previous controller versions were labeled IDX110M00-LC, whereas this is the newer IDX110M01-LC version. We are not quite sure exactly what Indilinx changed in this revision, but usually a new revision like this means better support of various brands of NAND Flash memory and bug fixes.

OCZ is using the Symwave SW6316, a single chip USB 3.0 to SATA storage controller for the SuperSpeed USB 3.0 interface. The SW6316 device can handle transfer speeds in excess of 270 MB/sec, more than 10x faster than current products based on USB 2.0 technology. The SW6316 device is fully compliant with USB 3.0 and SATA-II specifications and provides backwards compatibility with legacy USB 2.0 host ports.

Let’s take a look at the test system and then look at some performance benchmarks to see what the OCZ Enyo can do!